On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
> My presentation to Open Source Bridge will be using a browser. > The content was assembled with a new tool I've hacked up that I > plan to call "WYDIWYS" which stands for: > > What You Draw Is What You See > Design Show > Screen > Save Why not call it PCMCIA? For, "People can't memorize computer industry acronyms." Seriously, I thought the "what you X is what you Y" acronyms went out of style :) > > > The problem is that Open Office and Power Point *SUCK*. You > don't know until you connect the computer to the projector > what is actually going to appear on the screen - if anything. > The last time I presented Server Sky with OOo, it actually > rendered broken text (half the letters chopped off) on some > of the big title slides - apparently a problem with render > buffers when the framebuffer for projection is activated. Interesting. I've not experienced this as a presenter or audience member, but I can see it as frustrating. > > > The basic idea is that all slides are stored as fixed > pixel-based drawings, PNG preferred, but they can be anything > that a browser (any browser) can render accurately. Yes, > each slide now becomes 40KB, but I can easily share slides > between presentations (with hardlinks) so if I fix a slide > for one presentation (and don't clone it), I fix it for all. > I can build a whole series of presentations with make files. > For content creation, I can use anything that can make a > pixel drawing (including screen capture). While the hard > link feature is OS dependent, I can zip together an output > directory and load it on any machine, and display it on any > browser. What are you actually constructing the rasters with? What are they rasterized from? > > > Last night, WYDIWYS saved my butt. I finally had my whole > OSBRIDGE presentation assembled (with about 20 program > generated Flash animations). When I connected my laptop > to the projector, the Flash animations rendered perhaps > 4x too slowly. It appears that the compute load of the > extra frame buffer brings my ancient laptop and venerable > distro (RHEL5) to a crawl. By changing one line in an HTML > template file, I rendered the flash animations in "postage > stamp" mode, that is 512x384 rather than native 1024x768. > Irksome, not beautiful, but the change took 15 seconds to > make and 1 second to recompile the presentation. The old > full scale presentation remains in another directory, with > all the graphics hardlinked to sources, so the scaled version > only adds couple of megabytes on my disk (all the animations > take 200MB). I'm a little confused. I thought you said the presentation was stored as PNGs, but here you mention using Flash. Does your tool use flash to show the PNGs? > > > Finally, a quick question: As near as I can tell, WYDIWYS is > not a word in any language. However, it has a couple of "W"s in > it, and that can be a problem for some folks that stutter. I > like the WYDIWYS name, but I can use another if it is a problem. You could be like the mozilla folks and combine something from nature, such as an element, with a type of animal. Perhaps, Flux Bunny, Avalanche Bear, Hurricane Mosquito, or Moon Panda, as examples. > > > And if you are at Open Source Bridge, be sure to stop by Thursday > afternoon to see my Server Sky presentation. Shorter, prettier, > and much easier to understand than previous versions. > > Keith > > > P.S. There are other tools that create text-only slides for > presentation with browsers. However, they rely on the browser > to choose fonts, do the rendering of the image, etc., so the > results are not WYDIWYS. However, you can use any of those > tools, with screen capture, to prepare images for WYDIWYS. > Perhaps some clever Firefox guru can figure out a way to > automatically produce a series of images from those tools, > even building a WYDIWYS source file list from them. WYDIWYS > doesn't care where the slide images come from. If it's so easy to show on the web, then where are the gratuitous examples to entice us. (hint, hint :) Jason _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
